Online collaborative learning for developing English writing skills has been widely recognised for decades as a key approach to enhancing students' learning achievement and experiences through technology. However, it is generally one-way learning. Therefore, the virtual team concept has recently been applied to online learning and teaching to…

This article describes the results of a study that investigated the effect of features of talk that appear to foster higher levels of interaction, within the scope of a larger study (Davies and Meissel in Br Educ Res J 42:342-365, 2016). Students were recruited from seven classrooms across three secondary schools of varying socioeconomic levels…

Collaborative learning, social interdependence and computer mediated communication (CMC) have been broadly studied in higher education research. Collaborative learning has often been associated with a social interdependence understanding. However, this study explores the relationship from an exclusively student motivation perspective in order to…

This study used the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to provide a collaborative experience for students from marginalised communities in a large enrollment module in South Africa. The CoI framework consists of three elements including the social, cognitive, and teaching presences. This study focused on the teaching presence element, along with…

The management and coordination of classroom teaching continues to be a challenge, particularly as enrollment trends suggest that class sizes are growing. In the past, many faculty have divided their large classes into smaller groups to incorporate experiential exercises. In this article, we discuss the challenges of managing an experiential…

This case study describes the journey of an undergraduate module in its transition from an in-person lectures-plus-seminar configuration to an interactive, online format using Teams. I show how I created a sense of community and the opportunity for online group interaction by establishing small study groups that carried out weekly online group…

Purpose: This program evaluation aimed to investigate the benefits and challenges of an international, intercultural, e-community-engagement experience involving youth and higher education students. The authors sought to understand the meaning that participants would make of an international, intercultural, e-community-engagement experience.…

Shanghai International Studies University has hosted an intercultural Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) course for several years. Course facilitators, mentors, and learners from all over the world are invited to enroll in the class. However, conversations between mentors and learners revealed that most were superficial. Thus, a pilot study was…

Captured under the umbrella term Open Education, a wide range of educational initiatives has been popping up in the educational landscape. This study aims to offer empirical ground for understanding how Open Education introduces new forms of education. It does so by focusing on one initiative, namely the Interactive Open Online Courses included in…

In the wake of COVID-19, the postgraduate activities in physiology were shifted from live (face-to-face teaching) to virtual mode. This transition posed a challenge to postgraduate students and faculty moderators, especially for participant-centric group discussion, wherein face-to-face interaction contributes significantly to active learner…

The overarching goal of this design-based research was to explore WhatsApp's potential for facilitating and supporting speaking and pronunciation instruction in an EFL large-class speaking course. More specifically, this paper explored the perceived learning outcomes of WhatsApp-supported pedagogy in large English-speaking classes. Ninety-nine…

Massive open online courses are increasingly popular. One characteristic of most massive open online courses is that they are offering educational contents to masses of different individual learners. At the same time, a particular challenge for the individual learner could be the massiveness of such courses, that is, that one is part of a large…

An Australian higher education experience often includes group work as an important social learning opportunity. For international students, taking part in a group assignment can positively influence learning and adjustment to the new cultural and educational context through social interaction. However, students are increasingly choosing to use…

Because of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, most universities were forced to choose Online Distance Learning (ODL). The study aimed to examine the response of university students to the new situation. A questionnaire was sent to the entire university student population. Based on responses from 606 students, it was revealed that…

Interactions that take place between MOOC users outside of discussion forums, and out of the reach of course designers, have received little attention from the scientific community despite their potential influence on learner retention. Based on an online survey, we found that MOOCs are often used as an activity among friends and family, and not…